Microsoft and Google Lead in Cloud Growth, AWS Rules Overall

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the cloud provider to beat, but other IT titans are growing faster, according to a new analysis from the Synergy Research Group.

With nearly a third of the cloud infrastructure services market, AWS closed out the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2015 in first place. "Amazon/AWS continues to be in a league of its own with a worldwide market share of over 31 percent" for the year, said John Dinsdale, chief Analyst and research Director at Synergy, in an email to Datamation.

Amazon's share of the market grew 63 percent last quarter, year-over-year, but Microsoft and its sprawling cloud portfolio are growing faster.

Microsoft's cloud grew a whopping 124 percent last quarter, compared to the same year-ago period. All told, the Redmond, Wash. software company claimed 9 percent of the cloud infrastructure services market in 2015 for second place.
Meanwhile, a Mountain View, Calif. rival also made some major progress. Google notched a 108 percent year-over-year growth rate in Q4 2015. For the full year, Google claimed 4 percent of the market for fourth place.

Despite these gains, it's unlikely either will topple AWS any time soon. "Microsoft and Google both have tremendous growth rates but are so far behind AWS that they are not really impacting on its market share and leadership position," said Dinsdale.

Enterprise-friendly Big Blue still ranks high among cloud providers with a still-respectable growth rate of 57 percent and a 7-percent share of the market. "IBM remains one of the big four thanks in large part to its leadership in the private and hybrid services segment," Dinsdale observed. IBM finished the year in third place, above Google.

Rounding out the top five is Salesforce, tying Google with 4 percent of the market but growing slower at 40 percent.

Collectively, Synergy estimates that the cloud infrastructure services market, which includes IaaS, PaaS, private and hybrid cloud, is nearing $7 billion in quarterly revenues and $23 billion in trailing 12-month sales. Compared to 2014, revenues climbed 52 percent last year. Last month, Synergy said that the cloud computing market as a whole – including cloud infrastructure services, SaaS and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), hardware and software -- passed the $110 billion milestone in annual revenues in Q3 2015.